The last time I went on holiday, my daughter was six years old. She is about to turn thirty.
Twenty-two years. No Spain, no Greece, no long weekend in Bruges. Twenty-two years of not leaving Britain, which is not a boast or a tragedy, just what happened while I was busy doing other things.
And then, rather than easing myself back in with a fortnight somewhere with a beach and a Wetherspoons, I moved to the other side of the world. To a country I had never once set foot in. To live.
My wife did the difficult part. She found the job online, interviewed for it online, passed it online and had the visa sorted before I’d properly processed what was happening. My contribution was to turn up at the airport and immediately pay seventy quid for two fake copies of a form that is free, which I think tells you everything about the division of labour in our marriage.
The taxi
It was already dark when we came out of the airport. Properly dark, at seven in the evening.
That’s the first thing nobody warns you about. You’re two degrees off the equator here, which means roughly twelve hours of daylight and twelve hours of dark, every day, all year, give or take ten minutes. There is no long summer evening. There is no light at nine o’clock in June. The sun goes down at seven, every single night of your life, with the grim punctuality of a man who hates his job.
So I saw Kuala Lumpur for the first time as a series of lit-up shapes out of a taxi window on the motorway. Places I couldn’t name. Buildings I had no context for. A city I’d agreed to live in without ever having seen it.
I remember thinking, with the sort of clarity you only get when it’s far too late to change your mind: I am on the other side of the world. Not figuratively. Nearly literally.
It was overwhelming. It was also, and I want to be honest about this rather than doing the brave-explorer routine, enormously exciting. Daunting, out of my depth, no idea what I’d agreed to — and underneath it, a sort of settled certainty that it was going to be alright.
The bit where England stops making sense
You know what English countryside looks like. Hedges, oaks, a field, a cow having an opinion about you.
Out of that taxi window it was palm trees and jungle. Not jungle in the distance — jungle right there, up against the road, growing over things. Kuala Lumpur is a city in the middle of a jungle, and it has never entirely stopped being one.
And then the thing that properly landed, which I’ve thought about more than anything else from that first night:
In England, we have wild birds in the trees. Here they have wild monkeys.
In Britain you would go to a zoo. You’d pay, you’d queue, you’d stand looking at a monkey behind glass and your children would be briefly impressed. Here they’re simply about, in the way pigeons are about, being a nuisance to bin bags.
The flip side arrived shortly after. You can’t just go for a nice stroll through the countryside here — not casually, not the way you’d wander off across a footpath in Derbyshire. There are animals and insects out there that take a keen interest in you. I’m told. I have not conducted my own research and I don’t intend to.
The honeymoon period, and the thing nobody tells you about it
For the first two to six months, it did not feel like moving abroad. It felt like a very long holiday.
Everything was new. Everything was a novelty. Every meal was an event, every train ride was an outing, every trip to a supermarket was faintly thrilling. We weren’t living here, we were visiting, and the visit simply hadn’t ended yet.
Here’s the part I’d want to tell anyone making this move, and I’ve never seen it written down anywhere:
The real thing — bills, admin, the daily grind, the ordinary weight of just living somewhere — didn’t land for eighteen months.
Not two weeks. Not three months. A year and a half.
Every article about moving abroad warns you about culture shock in the first fortnight. Nobody mentions that the honeymoon can run for the better part of a year, and that the landing, when it comes, comes long after everyone’s stopped asking how you’re settling in.
It’s not a warning, exactly. Those first months were genuinely lovely and I wouldn’t trade them. But if you’re eighteen months in and suddenly wondering why it all feels like actual life rather than an adventure — that’s not you failing. That’s just the holiday ending, on schedule.
The heat
We landed in January. About twenty-eight degrees.
That’s their cool season. That’s the bit they describe as pleasant.
It takes somewhere between two weeks and two months to acclimatise, and there is nothing you can do to hurry it along. You will simply be damp for a while, and then one day you’ll notice you aren’t thinking about it any more. The ceiling fans help enormously, and cost almost nothing to run, which took me considerably longer to work out than it should have.
Would I do it again
I love to explore. It’s not a hobby, it’s closer to a fault — I’d rather see a thing than read about it, and I’d rather get lost than be told the way.
So sitting in that taxi, in the dark, in a country I knew nothing about, jet-lagged and seventy pounds down to a website that didn’t exist — what I mostly felt was that I couldn’t wait to start looking at it.
Eternal sunshine. Eternal summer. Lovely people. Monkeys instead of pigeons.
Twenty-two years is a long time to not go anywhere. Turns out it’s not a bad run-up.
Next: the honest guide to actually making the move, and what it costs once you’re here.
FACTS CHECKED
✓ Roughly 12 hours daylight / 12 hours darkness year-round — a consequence of Malaysia’s position near the equator
✓ Arrived January, around 28°C, which is typical for the cooler part of the Malaysian year
✓ Kuala Lumpur sits within a heavily forested tropical region — the jungle setting is not a figure of speech
✓ Macaques are commonly seen in and around Kuala Lumpur, including in urban and suburban areas
✓ 22-year gap, the taxi, the honeymoon timeline and the 18-month landing — Edward’s own account
⚠ Dangerous wildlife on countryside walks is written as reported hearsay, not asserted as fact, because Edward has not verified it first-hand
⚠ Acclimatisation of two weeks to two months is Edward’s experience, not a medical figure
